Tag: Hong Man Choi

Most ‘crimes’ in MMA take the form of inept judging and flagrant rule breaking, but this past year many professional fighters were caught up in activities that landed them inside of a very different sort of cage. Get ready for a trip down memory lane in our most depressing “booking roundup” of the year. Here’s your run down of 2011’s biggest arrests, convictions, acquittals, and sentencings.

Hong Man Choi is in a bit of hot water with the police in his hometown of Gwangjin, Korea where he stands accused this week of assaulting a female customer at a pub he owns.

According to police reports, the 7-foot-2, 367-pound K-1 veteran punched a woman in her 20s in the head on Saturday after she refused to pay her tab, which she claimed was too high for what she consumed. After a brief argument over the inflated amount of her bill, Choi allegedly became incensed after the woman cursed at him and attacked her.

News of the booking was first reported by the Korea Times.

The South Korean fighter, who has not competed in two years since his DREAM 11 loss to Minowaman in October 2009, posted a message on his website denying punching the woman.

“She verbally insulted me. I just could not take it anymore. I just pushed her a little bit. I swear that I never punched her,’’ he wrote.

‘claymore’ asks: Of all your opponents in your fighting career, who smelled the worst?
I can’t say which opponent smelled the worst but I can tell you one thing that really grossed me out. One time, Tom “Big Cat” Erikson (wrestling coach at Purdue University) came to my house to help me train for a fight. Anybody who is a true fan of the sport knows that Tom Erikson was the biggest stud in the Pride heavyweight division for a long time. Since I knew striking and Tom knew wrestling, we became quick friends and training partners.

One day we were training and Tom grabbed me and put me in some kind of a hold. At the time, I had absolutely no wrestling skills so I had to fight the type of fight that Tom Erikson wanted to. The problem was that his chest came together and all of his sweat drained directly off his long chest hairs into my mouth. Tom thought that he had me in a good hold and he had no idea what was happening, so I could only watch the open faucet pour right into my mouth. It was the nastiest thing that I’ve ever experienced in my life. I ended up letting Tom go and throwing up; it felt like two mouthfuls of sweat had drained downed my throat. I know that didn’t answer the “who smelled the worst” question, but it was definitely the grossest thing that has ever happened to me.

‘bgoldstein’ asks: Who was the most intimidating fighter you’ve ever faced? Was it Fedor? It was Fedor, wasn’t it.

(If a regarded submission and kickboxing specialist like Butterbean thinks Pudz needs to round out his game, it must be true.)

It didn’t take long for Moosin USA promoter Eric "Butterbean" Esch to go into damage control when he saw his potential October 9 main event slip through his fingertips.

A day after Sherdog’s Loretta Hunt quashed Moosin executive Corey Fischer’s claim in a report by MMAFighting that the promotion was finalizing a marquee bout between Kimbo Slice and Mariusz Pudzianowski for the planned Chicago show, Butterbean has spun the situation in a press release sent out by the organization earlier today.

Well it appears that contrary to popular belief, Moosin MMA may not go the way of the Yamma, just yet.

MMAFighting is reporting that the promotion, which is co-owned and promoted by Eric"Butterbean" Esch and Corey Fischer is planning a second card tentatively scheduled for October 9 in Chicago, Illinois.

According to Fischer, the promotion is in the process of securing a number of main event fights for the card that could potentially include UFC cast-off Kimbo Slice squaring off against "World’s Strongest Man" Mariusz Pudzianowski as well as a battle of awkward gangly brawlers Tim Sylvia and Hong Man Choi.

What they don’t know is whether he’ll fight for Dream or Sengoku, but apparently Dream contractees Alistair Overeem and Hong Man Choi have both been discussed as possible opponents.That means that he might get a real fight against the Strikeforce heavyweight champion (who, again, is avoiding fighting in the U.S. like he’s got some kind of Roman Polanski-esque legal troubles over here), or he’ll do the typical NYE freak show fight against Choi.Those are two very different potential futures for Sylvia.You’d hope that he would rather go the serious route if given the choice, but as we’ve seen in the past, Sylvia is not above taking a bout that makes no sense at all.

What do you do when you’re a broken-down Japanese MMA legend and you’ve been booked against an unknown American boxer in a meaningless exhibition? Make an absolute farce out of it, obviously. Check out Kazushi Sakuraba get his physical-comedy on during the DREAM.11 weigh-ins today (starting at the 0:59 mark). Despite the bizarre behavior, Rubin Williams was nice enough to shout out Saku as a "great champion," and referred to himself as a former world champion boxer, which may not be true. During a pre-fight interview, Williams told media that "I had a guy that was working with me on some MMA moves back in Detroit…As far as the ground game, I’ve been getting pretty good at it over the last year. So I’ll display what I’ve learned in the fight Tuesday." Yikes. Rubin, you may be able to pass guard on a training dummy, but that’s not going to help you against one of the best grapplers in the history of the sport. Don’t overthink it — just throw that overhand right and hope for a miracle.

After the jump: Full weigh-in results, and video of the Super Hulks hitting the scale. Nice t-shirt, Hong — was it laundry day?

(In the animal kingdom, playing dead can be considered an intelligent defense. In an MMA fight, not so much. Photo courtesy of Sherdog.)

Yesterday’s event may have been low on spectacle, but DREAM plans to come back strong for their next show. Here’s what’s on the card for DREAM.11 (October 6th, Yokohama):

— The long-awaited rubber-match between Shinya Aoki and Joachim Hansen. The two top-ten lightweights first met at PRIDE Shockwave 2006, where Aoki took out Hellboy via gogoplata. But Hansen got revenge last July, scoring a brutal TKO over Aoki at DREAM’s lightweight GP finals. Hansen has been inactive since that fight, while Aoki has gone 4-1, earning victories over Eddie Alvarez and Vitor Ribeiro, with his only loss to Hayato Sakurai in an ill-advised welterweight match.

Ah, the freak show: Where honest competition meets the insatiable human desire to see something weird, typically in Japan. We thought we’d take a look back and count down the ten craziest, most outlandish freak show fights in MMA history. Some are bizarre enough to be fun. Some are just horrible. At least one is [...]